Straight from the fourth cover of my last book. Joking. There's no book. Yet. Still, that was a really nice photoshoot.

Soooo… This is how it all started.

I remember when SCP-173 was the freshest thing to ever hit /x/. Retrospectively, one wonders how that doesn't happen more often, since /x/ was very much a cloaca. /x/ still is a cloaca. Anyway, when SCP writing breached containment out of 4chan and became its own thing as the Foundation, I didn't follow the move. General lack of interest in /x/ stuff, I suppose, and not being quite motivated by anything at the time.

I regret not following, though, because the Foundation turned into a hub of high quality writing over the years, which I never bothered perusing until quite recently, I'm ashamed to admit. Still, I began reading SCP articles in numerical order. Midway through Series 2, I felt I had to give back to the community through writing, as a token of thanks. So I joined the site.

Works on the Main Branch

This tale was the very first thing I wrote with the Foundation in mind, and also the first one I posted. It's not really a tale. After a couple weeks of binge reading SCP articles, I had this rather striking nightmare; while the structure wasn't new and some elements are definitely recurring, the Foundation making an appearance was fresh. Which is why I decided to write it down, as faithfully as possible.

Raw emotions and sensations that have little in common with waking life are hard to put into words, it turns out. This and the "faithfully" proposition made the whole process rather harrowing, especially towards the end. Reexperiencing the last few minutes over and over until I found words that could approach it is something I'm glad is behind me.

Reception was surprisingly warm given how out of left field the source material was.

This one also came from a nightmare. Precisely, from a novella I was reading while waiting for a train, in a nightmare.

That novella recounted the deaths of seven siblings. The opening chapter was about the first of them, a programmer working on an unsuccessful Mars colonization project, who found discarded code for an AI and nurtured it. Said AI went on to make the colony a success. The programmer was murdered by a jealous coworker.

The following chapters recounted the deaths of the programmer's brothers and sisters, each death more trivial and ignominious than the previous one, and the chapter accordingly shorter. The last one was only a paragraph, a simple newspaper filler report about how one of the sisters was raped and murdered on a blind date.

Then came the epilogue, dealing with events immediately following the first chapter, how the AI destroyed itself out of grief, causing the death of every colonist. And the suicide letter from the AI was such a gut punch I just had to write it down… Writing that part literally made me cry.

So I built a SCP file around it, reframing it in a Foundation context. It is sappy, definitely too much so. Meandering too. Overall, probably not very good. But I still liked it enough to not delete the draft.

This one didn't came from a nightmare. The idea of Loreley as a SCP anomaly I got while listening to Liszt's lied, the melody of which, suitably deep fried, became the audio log in the article.

The legend of Loreley being a modern one, and a quickly fading one, inspired the manifestation of belief angle and the Department of Ethnography. There's more in that vein to tap, and I probably will.

Writing from that premise came flowing rather fast and easily, just drawing a few more elements from the collective imagination surrounding the Rhine. Also made me want to reread some of C.G. Jung's works, which I probably will…

A simple tale outlining the Genius Loci protocol, teasing about related anomalies and fleshing out the core idea. It's most certainly going to evolve along my next works, and be cross-linked with those.